THE WHOLE WORLD WAS WATCHING

By LANCE MORROW

Outside the Hilton, at the corner of Michigan avenue and Balbo Drive, I stood talking to Winston Spencer Churchill. Churchill was kicking around the world as a correspondent. I noticed he liked to watch the reaction when he stuck out his hand and said, "Hullo, I'm Winston Churchill." For he resembled his grandfather's pictures taken when that young Winston covered the Boer War at the turn of the century--boyish and freckled, greedy for trouble. Now, behind the police lines, Churchill and I chatted with a guilty, voyeur's air, as if awaiting some illegal sporting event--a cockfight or a sloppily organized human sacrifice.

It was early evening on Wednesday, just after 7. Even on the lakefront, the air stank. The tear gas dispensed by one side and the stink bombs set off by the other lingered in mouth and throat. Across the scene (phalanxes of blue-helmeted cops, battle jeeps with barbed wire like mustaches across their grilles, the guerrilla-idealist young in tantrum, their faces contorted with rage) there swept not only rhythmic waves of sound ("Hey, Hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?") but an amazing Satanic smell, a Yippie genius' brew that simulated vomit, decomposing flesh, death, cloaca and kindred flavors. It was what evil would smell like if it were available in an aerosol can--bad enough to make the South Side stockyards, next door to the convention, smell almost wholesome. This exotic moral stink had drifted halfway around the world, after all, from Vietnam.

In front of the Hilton, on Michigan Avenue, two sides of America ground against each other like tectonic plates. Each side cartooned and ridiculed the other so brutally that by now the two seemed to belong almost to different species. The '60s had a genius for excess and caricature. On one side, the love-it-or-leave-it, proud, Middle American, Okie-from-Muskogee, traditionalist nation of squares who supported the cold war assumptions that took Lyndon Johnson ever deeper into Vietnam. On the other side, the "countercultural" young, either flower children or revolutionaries, and their fellow-traveling adult allies in the antiwar movement, the Eugene McCarthy uprising against L.B.J., people whose hatred of the war in Vietnam led them into ever greater alienation from American society and its figures of authority.

Mayor Richard Daley's front-line forces in Chicago must have been chosen for immovable heft, men built like trucks. Now they silently palm-smacked their clubs, their eyes as narrow as the slits in an armored car. Most of the convention delegates and dignitaries quartered in the fortress Hilton were at the moment three miles away at the convention hall, preparing to bestow upon poor Hubert Humphrey the nomination he thought would redeem the years of humiliation and corrupting self-abasement he had endured as Johnson's Vice President.

The police needed to protect the Hilton nonetheless. It housed not only delegates and candidates but also the country's besieged political process, its apparently crumbling legitimacy. Recollect the famous sequence at the front end of 1968, that bizarre and violent year:

1) The war that America was fighting for inaccessible reasons in an obscure little Southeast Asian country seemed to blow up in America's face with the communists' Tet offensive in late January.

2) Minnesota's Democratic Senator, Eugene McCarthy, challenged his President, Lyndon Johnson, in the New Hampshire primary and won 42.4% of the Democratic vote. Seeing that, Robert Kennedy hurried into the race.

3) L.B.J. withdrew as a candidate for re-election.

4) Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a murder that precipitated days of riots in cities across the country.

5) Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles in early June. And so on. It is a part of the folklore, each act more amazing than the one before, a dark jack-in-the-box of history. On Tuesday night of the Democratic Convention week, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and eradicated the "Prague spring."

Now there was silence on the cops' side of the barricades--an ominous, hurricane stillness. On the other side: the dirty, skinny, red-eyed, hyper, unslept, screaming, antiwar young, their youthful energy converted to electrical fury. Rage shot out of them like sparks, like flaming snakes. No flowers in their hair now. The foresighted wore football helmets.

Then the cops charged. They moved with surprising speed and a nimble fury like that of a rhinoceros attacking. A flying wedge of blue drove down Balbo into the noisy, ragged flesh on Michigan. The cops bent to their work, avengers at harvest time, chop-swinging clubs with methodical ferocity, a burst-boil rage. And in the midst of it, I began to detect a certain professional satisfaction of the kind a hitter feels sometimes. The cops had found a ghastly sweet spot. The sound that a club makes when it strikes a human skull--in earnest--awakens in the hearer a sickened, fearful amazement. No kidding now: a thunk! resonant through the skull and its wet package of thought and immortal soul.

It dawned on me that I was now an animal as much in season as the protesters, for the blue rhino was wheeling back, flailing through the bloodied crowd. I skittered into the Hilton lobby. A cop lumbered after me with club upraised and aimed at my skull just above the left ear. I held up my press credentials like a ridiculous little magic shield, like a clove of garlic or the sign of the cross, and the cop went into freeze-frame and thought about the matter long and hard before at last he lowered his club, a flicker of disappointment in his eye, and moved on to hunt for other game deeper in the lobby.

The cops outside went on banging heads almost indiscriminately. Middle-aged bystanders were as likely to be bloodied as young radicals. People were dragged feetfirst, heads bouncing on pavement, to paddy wagons and hurled in.

The demonstrators knew their McLuhan and chanted, "The whole world is watching." After a delay caused by strikes that prevented live transmission, the television networks finally broadcast the footage of what a national commission would later call a "police riot." Uncle Walter Cronkite was visibly furious. Tom Wicker would write in the New York Times, "Those were our children in the streets, and the Chicago police beat them up."

The bashing on Michigan Avenue was only one of a series that week. In the last, just before dawn on Friday after the convention adjourned, the police permitted themselves to go berserk in the halls of the Hilton, rousting sleeping McCarthy workers from their rooms and beating on their skulls. Police claimed the workers had been throwing things (beer cans, ashtrays, bags of excrement) down on cops from the windows above.

The 1968 Democratic Convention was part of the Ur-mess of the '60s and in a sense the Big Bang of the American culture wars. And here we are in 1996: more or less the same two tectonic plates are still grinding against each other in America. Their surfaces may be a little smoother now.

Before Johnson fell for the tar baby of Vietnam, Americans believed their Presidents almost always told them the truth. The level of trust and therefore respect for authority was probably foolishly high. All of that changed in the fatal asininity of Vietnam. The baby boomers' rites of passage turned into a huge Oedipal overtoppling of authority, an assault on Dad that was disorientingly successful.

It takes years for all the myth and trauma to work through the system. Maybe they have done so only this summer, after 28 years have passed and the Democrats feel free, as adults now, leaders of the party, to return to the old slaughterhouse. This year the Democrats have conducted a lottery for groups that want to hold protests at their convention.

After the police charged on Michigan Avenue, I lost track of Churchill and did not see him again at the convention. Chicago that week was crawling with famous names, including an unusual number of literary celebrities, all bent on getting high on a snort of anti-Establishment danger and writing about it--Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, who went about dispensing his Buddhist "oms" through the tear gas. Next week the Chicago convention may run more to Hollywood celebrities. None will be teargassed.